At 1:59 in the morning on Friday, March 14 – or, for convenience, at 1:59 in the afternoon – take a moment to pause and contemplate π (aka pi), as, if you write your date US style, that's the moment to celebrate the universal glory that is Pi Day.
Yes, one more year has come and and gone, and it's again time to continue a …

Re: Erm...

Re: Erm...

"Is it possible for you Brits to be any more provincial? Some folks denote dates in different ways than you do, y'now?"

First of all this site is british (.co.uk should be a giveaway). Sure some folks denotes dates in different way, however most of the world denotes in little-endian (DDMMYYYY), some with alternate big-endian (YYYYMMDD) notation. I think you will find that merkins are pretty much alone with the odd middle-endian notation.

Re: Like so many other web stories, this only applies to America.

Re: Like so many other web stories, this only applies to America.

If you define Pi to be the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (which many people do) then all you need to do is significantly warp space-time (a singularity would do it) to alter the value of Pi (in the vicinity of the warp). Perhaps this is what they're aiming for in Indiana?

If the universe is a hypersphere (debatable, the hyper torus looks more yummy) and you draw a circle big enough (imagine you're standing at the north pole and draw a circle around the equator) then Pi is equal to 2. Make the circle bigger (you standing at north pole and drawing a circle round the south pole) and Pi becomes less than 1 (the diameter is longer than the circumference), shrinking down to 0.

Yep, you heard it here first -- Pi is variable and depends on the size of the circle and your locality.

Re: Like so many other web stories, this only applies to America.

Re: Like so many other web stories, this only applies to America.

I bought my brothers a Raspberry Pi each a couple of Christmases ago. I told them that I'd set up an easy to remember password for them: 22/7. Cue blank looks all around until I explained that 22/7 is approximately Pi. What's worse is that one of them even took maths in uni :(

This is why we keep trying to ban leap seconds. It starts with a leap second here and a leap second there, and before you know it we're having leaps days every four years and then someone decides to insert two whole leap months.

"Of all the many and varied stupid things in the world"

It's not exactly stupid - most people are more inclined to say "March 14th" than "the 14th of March", after all. It just isn't hierarchical to talk about March 14th 2014.

On the other hand, when sorting objects by date it's much easier to use MMM-DD than DD-MMM. Take a look at the Register's own URLs - all today's articles are filed in subdirectory /2014/03/14/. So for IT purposes the American system of expressing dates is superior ... at least, when you don't do it half-assed.

" using MMDDYYYY doesn't help sort at all"

Re: "Of all the many and varied stupid things in the world"

"On the other hand, when sorting objects by date it's much easier to use MMM-DD than DD-MMM. Take a look at the Register's own URLs - all today's articles are filed in subdirectory /2014/03/14/. So for IT purposes the American system of expressing dates is superior ... at least, when you don't do it half-assed."

That is YYYY-MM-DD and yes it is superior for IT use but it is still not the stupid, brain dead, fucked up way of writing dates that yanks use.